A history of folly, from the Trojan horse to Afghanistan | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian

A history of folly, from the Trojan horse to Afghanistan | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian:

"Far from defeating the enemy, technology is portrayed as shielding soldiers from the immediate result of their actions, hence distorting tactics and corrupting strategy. By recording failure in meticulous detail, the logs mock the moral basis for so-called wars among the peoples. Like Vietnam's TV images, they leave the Iraq and Afghan conflicts as bloodthirsty killing fields, devoid of rational justification.

The war logs are not so much sensational as relentless. Most of the material was known. It is the detail that bears devastating witness. Afghanistan 2001 now enters firmly into the pantheon of folly, from the wooden horse to Napoleon in Moscow to Vietnam. Indeed it bears the added crassness of coming two decades after the Russians committed the exact same folly in the same place.

What Wikileaks really revealed. What technology hides through technological warfare, the web helps to reveal.

MinnPost - The paper book is dead, long live the narrative

MinnPost - The paper book is dead, long live the narrative:

Wreading. All things digital blur. Any formerly crisp boundary in the physical world becomes porous and fuzzy in the digital world by the mere fact that content is no longer captive to the container. While the ideas behind any piece of fiction or non-fiction are intangible, rendered as ink on paper, they are immutable. Kept in the native form of bits, by contrast, the expression of an idea is not only fungible, but the reader can become a writer – what I am calling a wreader. A previously solitary experience becomes a social experience (unlike this one, so far).

Righting. Wikipedia is an example. It is about intellectual property seen as a collective process. The expansion and correcting of content is admittedly more germane to non-fiction than fiction, but the point is that text with digital readers can evolve both in terms of facts and point of view on those facts. To date with physical books, the closest approximation we have is reading somebody’s annotations in the margin. Another example is commentary at the end of a digitally published article. You might argue that the original narrative of such an article is often more considered, deliberate and refined than the comments that follow. True. But the volume (in the sense of loudness) and tone of the feedback is a form of self-correction of ideas, one that we have never had before.
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Why a Wreader and Righter? Why not a Weader and a Wrighter, or a Rweader and a Rwighter?

Slavoj Žižek: Wake up and smell the apocalypse

Slavoj Žižek: Wake up and smell the apocalypse
New Scientist
30 August 2010 by Liz Else

Do these issues arise from problems about what humans are becoming, and the relationships between the public and the private?

Yes. These are problems of the commons, the resources we collectively own or share. Nature is commons, biogenetics is genetic commons, intellectual property is commons. So how did Bill Gates become the richest man on earth? We are paying him rent. He privatised part of the "general intellect", the social network of communication - it's a new enclosure of the commons. This has given a new boost to capitalism, but in the long term it will not work. It's out of control.

Take a bottle of water: I produce it, you buy it. If I drink it, you cannot. Knowledge is exactly the opposite. If it freely circulates, it doesn't lose value; if anything, it gains value. The problem for companies is how to prevent the free circulation of knowledge. Sometimes they spend more money and time trying to prevent free copying than on developing products.

And now others are working even harder to enclose part of the social network commons.

The city is a hypertext

By Tim Carmody • Aug 12, 2010
on
The City is a Hypertext

And whenever I read anything about the web rewiring our brains, foretelling immanent disaster, I've always thought, geez, people -- we live in cities! Our species has evolved to survive in every climate and environment on dry land. Our brains can handle it!

Same ground that I continue to think about, Georg Simmel &c., but with some new additions.
I like relevance of this

Steve Jobs recently compared the shift from desktop to mobile computers to the shift from trucks to cars. You could maybe say something similar about the future of physical books compared to other kinds of media. The older forms don't go away, but they become more specialized, and the relationships between them become different, as our lifestyles change.

Is it that there is some basic difference in the character of our interactions with e-book readers, for example, something that connects them to a more urban, more alienated mode of existence. I can't at the moment imagine, but it is worth thinking about.

After Afghan War Leaks, Revisions in a Shield Bill - NYTimes.com

After Afghan War Leaks, Revisions in a Shield Bill - NYTimes.com:

"Senators Charles E. Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, Democrats of New York and California, are drafting an amendment to make clear that the bill’s protections extend only to traditional news-gathering activities and not to Web sites that serve as a conduit for the mass dissemination of secret documents. The so-called “media shield” bill is awaiting a vote on the Senate floor."

The war on WikiLeaks continues, or gathers steam. Would the "Pentagon Papers" fall under the shield of "traditional news-gathering"? And what is traditional news-gathering anymore?

Mel Gibson, Lindsay Lohan... and you too. Why your reputation needs an online detox | Technology | The Observer

Mel Gibson, Lindsay Lohan... and you too. Why your reputation needs an online detox | Technology | The Observer:

"We assume that Mr Harris would like his 'Google resume' to reflect positively on his unique career in international journalism. He can build that brand by ensuring that a Google search brings up positive and relevant content like his Observer profile, some of his best articles, his book, and his author page."

This is the first time, but probably not the last, that I have come across the term "Google resume."

The Ghosts of World War II's Past (20 photos) - My Modern Metropolis

The Ghosts of World War II's Past (20 photos) - My Modern Metropolis:

"Taking old World War II photos, Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov carefully photoshops them over more recent shots to make the past come alive. Not only do we get to experience places like Berlin, Prague, and Vienna in ways we could have never imagined, more importantly, we are able to appreciate our shared history in a whole new and unbelievably meaningful way."